Friday, July 31, 2015

There are attempts by politicians and the media to dehumanise
some of the world’s most vulnerable and desperate people, men, women and
children who risk their lives to flee poverty, oppression and war in search a
better life.

Berakat from Eritrea, where he was discriminated for being
Christian but now he is being persecuted for wanting to reach England. “Why are
you closing the door?” he asked. “We’re not animals, barbarians.”

“We’re treating a growing number of people who have been
injured, many of them seriously, after falling from trucks and from police
brutality. Almost all have fled their home countries because of armed conflict,
political, religious or racial persecution. Many have endured extremely long,
difficult and dangerous journeys.”

Politicians and the media talk of an “immigrant invasion” and
the part of feral press has called for British troops to be used in France to guard
the Euro-Tunnel. They declare 2,000 migrants had attempted to enter Britain in one
night, without making it clear they meant many repeated attempts by the same
group of a few hundred migrants. But the original claim was enough to leave the
clear impression that Britain was now under nightly siege and the government
was powerless to do anything about it.

United Nations’ Peter Sutherland said: “Anybody who thinks
that by erecting borders and fences in some way a particular state can be
protected from alleged ‘floods’ – which are anything but floods of migrants –
is living in cloud cuckoo land.”

In Germany for the first half of this year, 200 attacks on
asylum-seekers’ homes have been recorded. The real figure, say analysts, is
probably far higher. Many refugees fail to report attacks, largely because they
do not want to bring further attention to themselves. The Hungarian Prime
Minister, Victor Orban, actively incites peoples fears to compete for
popularity with the neo-fascists. “What we have at stake today is Europe, the
European way of life, the survival or disappearance of European values and
nations, or their transformation beyond recognition … We would like Europe to
be preserved for the Europeans. But there is something we would not just like
but we want because it only depends on us: we want to preserve a Hungarian
Hungary.” He organises xenophobic referendum campaigns and builds walls on his
borders – ironically, where the Iron Curtain was lifted.

This not need to be. German
local communities come together gathering food and clothing for refugees ,
retired teachers offering language lessons for free, and people opening their
homes for foreigners to live with them. In Fürstenfeldbruck, a town of 35,000
in Bavaria , that has taken in 1,600 refugees over the past few months, 600
locals have signed up to volunteer their time for everything from teaching
refugees German to organising computers and internet access. “We’re working
flat out,” said a woman who helps asylum-seekers fill out their application
forms. “And we have been for months.”

Is the UK full up?
"For example, you could say that if we hadn’t built all the golf courses
we have in Surrey, then we’d have a lot more space to build housing and
therefore be in a better position to manage an increased population….Logic
dictates that you cannot keep increasing your population forever. However, when
I first began studying this subject in the 1960s, the assumption was that the
population would increase to as much as 80 million by the end of the century.
All sorts of regional strategies were developed, including plans to create
substantial extra capacity in towns like Milton Keynes, Swindon and
Northampton. But then the pill was invented and that simply didn’t
happen."

Are immigrants taking
our jobs? “When something like a quarter of a million Poles entered the UK.
However, recorded unemployment rates went down between 2003 and 2005, and
recorded vacancy rates actually went up slightly… the data would suggest that
they weren’t taking the jobs of Brits…The econometric evidence suggests
immigration doesn’t generally impact on the pay or employment rates of existing
citizens. People in lower paid jobs are more likely to be affected, but even
then the effect, statistically speaking, is relatively small.”

Are most immigrants illegal?
There are only two countries that really have any idea how many immigrants
have entered illegally, and they are Australia and North Korea. This is because
Australia counts everyone in and out, while North Korea has border controls
that most people would consider unacceptable. Many of the people who are in the
country illegally are people who have entered legally, but stayed beyond the
period they had permission for. But the number of people who actually get into
Britain illegally must be pretty small, due to the stringent checks that exist
at our main points of entry.

Do immigrants claim a
disproportionately high amount in welfare and benefits payments? “The
studies that have been done do show that immigrants are less likely to claim
benefits that native Britons. People who have asylum claims, for example, are
not allowed to be employed while their application is being processed, so it is
inevitable that they will need more support through welfare payments. But
again, that is a relatively small group. On the whole, the story is that
migrants are less likely to access benefits payments.”

Do immigrants put too
much strain on education and health services?” Services may be under
pressure, but you simply cannot generalise….The number of immigrants who work
in health and care sectors…have suggested as many as a one in four new nurses
are recruited from abroad.”

As Leigh Daynes again pointed out: “These are ordinary people – mothers, fathers, daughters and
sons – living in the most horrendous conditions that no one should have to
endure. Many are highly educated, including doctors, dentists and engineers,
fleeing extreme violence and poverty and simply wanting better lives for
themselves, so much so they are prepared to risk their lives for it.”

Wherever capitalism draws invisible lines across the planet
and say that any human on one side of the line can have dreams, but any human on
the other side of the line, can only live in a nightmare, people will think
about crossing that imaginary line.

For those of us in the World Socialist Movement, they are our fellow-workers, fully deserving our sympathy, support, and solidarity.

“Let those desert us who will because we refuse to shut the
international door in the faces of their own brethren; we will be none the
weaker but all the stronger for their going, for they evidently have no clear
conception of the international solidarity, are wholly lacking in the
revolutionary spirit, and have no proper place in the Socialist movement while
they entertain such aristocratic notions of their own assumed superiority.” - Eugene
Debs

Thursday, July 30, 2015

The global population is predicted to be 9.7 billion people
by 2050 despite fall in fertility.

The rush to increase food production has caused catastrophic
environmental degradation – we need to make agriculture climate-resilient and
more efficient. The World Bank’s view that we need to grow 50% more food by
2050 to feed 9 billion people, while finding ways to reduce carbon emissions
from agriculture at the same time, ignores one very simple fact – we already
grow enough food for 10 billion people. But a combination of storage losses
after harvest, overconsumption and waste mean that some 800 million people in
developing countries are malnourished.

Today the environmental toll from this boom is all too
evident. 38% of the planet’s cropland is degraded, 11% of the irrigated area is
salt contaminated, 90% of the biodiversity of the 20 main staple crops has been
lost, nitrogen fertiliser produces 6% of greenhouse gases and its runoff
creates 400 marine “dead zones” (areas where oxygen concentration is so low
that animal life suffocates), and more than 350,000 people die every year from
pesticide toxicity.

Research on planetary boundaries estimates that nitrogen
fertiliser use needs to decline by 75% to avoid large-scale environmental
impact of this kind. The focus on productivity over efficiency has meant that
the amount of energy needed to grow the same quantity of food has increased by
between one-quarter and one-third over the last 25 years. Even without climate
change, conventional chemical agriculture is driving humanity towards a
food-security cliff.

A Christian Aid briefing paper argues that if we are to
reverse this situation in the face of climate change, agriculture needs a
transformative change in the way it addresses climate resilience. Small-scale
farmers and pastoralists, who manage 60% of agricultural land and produce 50%
of the planet’s food, should be central to this agenda. Research to solve theirproblems should be guided by their
priorities, and take place largely on their farms. The kind of support
farmers want often includes advice on soil management and testing, reliable
climate forecasts, and development of their own seed and livestock breeding
processes. The advice they get usually revolves around unaffordable chemical
fertilisers and pesticides, while their ability to exchange and sell locally
adapted crop seeds is threatened by corporate-inspired legislation promoting
crop varieties developed in distant biotech labs. Small-scale women farmers
manage up to 90% of staple food production but only 15% of agricultural
advisers are women, and only 5% of advice reaches women.

For farmers to invest in resilience, they need secure land
tenure, especially when they participate in communal land-tenure systems. Land
deals with largely foreign buyers have increased to 55 million hectares. This not only
dispossesses farmers but also undermines the confidence that others need to invest
in measures to control land erosion, in trees and in other adaptations that pay
off over several years.

The "rush to production" was simply about profit -
primitive accumulation of capital - it has absolutely nothing to do with
feeding dispossessed people who can't pay for it. The rape of land and
resources, the driving off the land of subsistence farmers, the domination and
control of seeds (deliberated engineered to produce plants that produce
infertile seeds), the creation of dependency on insecticides and fertilisers
... and finally the ulitmate insult to hungry people - the deliberate hoarding
and destruction of food to keep market prices from falling so that profits are
maintained. Nothing has changed since the "Great Irish Famine": when 1
milllion starved while those who owned farms and livestock carried on exporting
to markets that could pay for the produce. The reason people in developing
countries are malnourished is that they are poor, and don't have enough money
to feed themselves properly.

Following on from an earlier post, the World Bank said coal
was no cure for global poverty on Wednesday, rejecting a main industry argument
for building new fossil fuel projects in developing countries. Coal, oil and
gas companies have pushed back against efforts to fight climate change by
arguing fossil fuels are a cure to “energy poverty”, which is holding back
developing countries, arguing instead that the low global prices for coal and
oil are a benefit for poor countries. Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest
privately held coal company, went so far as to claim that coal would have
prevented the spread of the Ebola virus.

In a rebuff to coal, oil and gas companies, Rachel Kyte, the
World Bank climate change envoy, said continued use of coal was exacting a
heavy cost on some of the world’s poorest countries, in local health impacts as
well as climate change, which is imposing even graver consequences on the
developing world.

“In general globally we need to wean ourselves off coal,”
Kyte explained . “There is a huge social cost to coal and a huge social cost to
fossil fuels … if you want to be able to breathe clean air.” Kyte said that
when it came to lifting countries out of poverty, coal was part of the problem
– and not part of a broader solution. “Do I think coal is the solution to
poverty? There are more than 1 billion people today who have no access to
energy,” Kyte said. Hooking them up to a coal-fired grid would not on its own
wreck the planet, she went on. But then Kyte added: “If they all had access to
coal-fired power tomorrow their respiratory illness rates would go up, etc, etc
… We need to extend access to energy to the poor and we need to do it the
cleanest way possible because the social costs of coal are uncounted and
damaging, just as the global emissions count is damaging as well.”

The fossil fuel industry has launched a global public
relations offensive around the notion of “energy poverty”, trying to rebrand
the dirtiest of fossil fuels as a poverty cure. Spokesmen for Shell have called
efforts to cut use of fossil fuels in developing countries “energy
colonialism”.

Globally, London is the third most expensive city to live in.
London is 36 per cent pricer than Manchester, 38 per cent more than Glasgow,
and 40 per cent more than Belfast. London rents were now more than double the
national average, and in May is was announced by forecasting group Oxford
Economics that it was likely the average home in London would cost £1 million
by 2030. A study conducted by Liverpool Economics on behalf of four London
borough councils found that the Government's plans to sell off more council
homes through an extension of the Right to Buy scheme would drive rent prices
up even further. London has the second most expensive public transport in the
world, the third most expensive utility costs, and the fifth most expensive
theatre tickets.

After London, the most expensive UK city is Aberdeen - which
has notoriously high rents and prices due to it being a centre for Britain's
oil industry in the North Sea.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Renewable energy is an easier, quicker and cheaper method
than burning coal to help lift people out of poverty through access to power,
Oxfam Australia says, intent upon challenging the mining industry's
"spin" about coal and poverty. Coal, Oxfam says: "has found a
loyal champion in the Australian government."

Yet coal is ill-suited as a power source for most people
living without electricity.

More than one billion people around the world don't have
power and 84 per cent of those live in rural areas, the Powering Up Against
Poverty report says. It says the cost of extending electricity grids to those
rural areas offsets any economic incentive of coal power, making renewable
energy a cheaper option. It's also quicker to install local solar panels than
build coal plants. In addition to the negative consequences of extreme weather
events because of global warming, it says, coal mines kill hundreds of
thousands of people as a result of air pollution, and displace poor
communities.

Oxfam Australia's climate change policy advisor and report
author Dr Simon Bradshaw said contrary to the rhetoric of the coal industry,
coal was not suited to meeting the needs of most people in the developing world
living without electricity.

"Four out of five people without electricity live in
rural areas that are often not connected to a centralised energy grid, so
local, renewable energy solutions offer a much more affordable, practical and
healthy solution than coal," he said. "The Australian coal industry,
faced with the rapid decline in the value of its assets and an accelerating
global transition to renewable energy, has been falsely promoting coal as the
main solution for increasing energy access and reducing poverty around the
world. But as well as failing to improve energy access for the world's poorest
people, burning coal contributes to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths
each year due to air pollution and is the single biggest contributor to climate
change, pushing people around the world deeper into poverty."

Dr Bradshaw said Oxfam was seeing the world's poorest people
made even more vulnerable through the increasing risk of droughts, floods,
hunger and disease due to climate change.
"The argument that 'coal is good for humanity' really doesn't stack
up when you consider the facts; such as the major shifts in energy and climate
policy in China, India and other major economies; the cost of renewable energy
is falling fast; new technologies such as advanced batteries are overcoming any
shortfalls renewable energy has had in the past; investors are shifting their
focus from coal towards renewables, and the evidence of harm that coal does to
communities," he said. "The future can be brighter for both Australia
and poorer communities around the world; but only if we wake up to the changing
global realities, stand up to vested interests and help to build the renewable
energy economies of the future."

In Puerto Rico over 13 percent of people are unemployed, 45
percent of people live below the poverty line.

Hedge fund managers and bondholders are pressing the
government of Puerto Rico to drive through a series of punishing austerity
measures, including dramatic cuts to public education and workers' rights
protections. A group representing $5.2 billion of debt held by 38 investment
managers paid three former economists for the International Monetary Fund, who
now are employed by the firm Centennial Group International, to devise policy
recommendations in response to Governor Alejandro García Padilla's claim last
month that Puerto Rico's $72 billion debt is "not payable."

The report urges slashing public programs—particularly
education—and privatizing assets and industries including proposals to:
"Reduce number of teachers to fit the size of the student population;
Reduce subsidy to University of Puerto Rico; Cut excess Medicaid
benefits."

Puerto Rico's government has already closed 100 schools in
2015 alone. Puerto Rico's teachers' unions have vigorously opposed attempts to
drive through cuts, and in May, thousands of educators and students took to the
streets and staged strikes to protest a proposed $166 million cut to the
University of Puerto Rico's budget.

The study also recommends "structural reforms" to
regulations and worker protections, including calls to: "Amend local labor
laws regarding overtime, vacation time, mandatory bonuses, and others;" and
changes that would "make welfare benefits consistent with local labor
market conditions."

The report calls for taxpayers' money to be put towards
"public private partnerships" to construct or operate buildings and
ports.

Activist Vijay Prashad recently argued that the government embraces the IMF agenda of privatization and cutbacks: "Garcia Padilla continues to use the word 'sacrifice' in his speeches. The question asked by Puerto Ricans is why such a word is only used against ordinary people and never against the bankers."

Offering a stark warning of how corporate-friendly trade
pacts like the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) put both democracy
and the environment at risk, a Canadian company is seeking damages from Romania
after being blocked from creating an open-pit gold mine over citizen concerns. Gabriel
Resources Ltd. announced that it had filed a request for arbitration with the
World Bank's International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes to seek
as much as $4 billion of damages.

The corporation's Rosia Montana open-pit gold mine project
stalled after a series of protests in cities across Romania in 2013 demanded
Gabriel's plan be dropped. Romanian residents and environmental activists have
opposed the mine since it was proposed in the 1990s, charging that it would
blast off mountaintops, destroy a potential UNESCO World Heritage site, and
displace residents from the town of Rosia Montana and nearby villages. In
particular, local communities opposed the use of cyanide as part of the
extraction process. Such opposition led to widespread street protests in 2013,
which in turn pressured the Romanian Parliament to reject a bill introduced by
the government that would have paved the way for the mine. Now, Gabriel
Resources, which holds an 80 percent stake in the Rosia Montana Gold
Corporation, says the country has violated international treaties.

With the vast expansion of the use of Investor-State Dispute
Settlement brought about by the TTIP Romanians and other Europeans can only
expect more of such cases. TTIP and a few other trade agreements being negotiated
at the moment would expand the coverage of investor-state arbitration from
around 20% to around 80% of investment flows to and from the U.S. and the EU. The
recent case opened by Gabriel Resources against Romania serves as an omen of
what Europe's future may look like if citizen power is not restored. Corporations
whose operations are resource-extracting (mining, fracking, gas, oil, etc.) look
at geological reports and only see dollar$. They lay waste to pristine areas,
villages, towns and pollute soil, air, and water that may never be saved,
restored or returned. History has shown what wanton ravaging of natural
resources does to all flora and fauna; our planet is consumed by the drive to
accumulate profits.

The movie image of Haiti has been centred on “voodoo” and
“zombies” but yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of the commencement of the
U.S. Occupation of Haiti. On July 28, 1915, U.S. Marines landed on the shores
of Haiti, occupying the country for 19 years. Many argue that the U.S. has
never stopped occupying Haiti. Some use the word “humanitarian occupation” to
describe the current situation, denouncing the loss of sovereignty, as U.N.
troops have been patrolling the country for over 11 years. Foreign troops are
on the ground, controlling the country; the military regimes operated with
complete immunity and impunity. Haitian NGO worker Yvette Desrosiers declared:
“the Americans hide their face, they send Brazilians, Argentines… he’s hidden
but he’s the one in command!”

During the 1915 U.S. Marines Occupation, a young, ambitious
secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt bragged to have personally
written the Haitian constitution, easily scuttled through the puppet regime
installed by the Marines. This constitution, formally adopted in 1918, opened
up land for foreign ownership, and formalized the linguistic exclusion and
hegemony of the ruling classes by naming French as only official language. This
constitution paved the way for U.S. agribusiness interests such as United Fruit
(Chiquita) to buy up tracts of land, and capitalist speculators such as James
P. McDonald to build a railroad, asking to own the tract for 13 miles on either
side, almost all of Haiti’s arable land. Needless to say this was a boon for
foreign investors, and the local merchants who monopolized foreign trade, while
expropriating thousands of peasant farmers.

Constitutional changes were also in store during the
contemporary occupation. In addition to rejecting the increase in the minimum
wage, Bill Clinton and the U.N. are also credited for introducing
constitutional reforms. Haiti’s 1987 constitution was the culmination of what
Fritz Deshommes called a re-founding of the nation. The popular movements that
succeeded in forcing out the Duvalier dictatorship stood fast against the
military junta and repression. Passed with over 90 percent of the vote on March
29, 1987, the constitution was based on human rights, guaranteeing both liberal
political rights like freedom of press, religion, and assembly as well as
social rights such as education and housing. In addition, the constitution
elevated Haitian Creole as official language, shared with French. Reeling from
29 years of the Duvalier dictatorship, the public was wary of centralization of
power in the executive. The office of Prime Minister, to be ratified by
Parliament, was put into place. Power was also shared in the Territorial
Collectivities, including 570 communal sections. Despite advances in gender
equity and dual citizenship for Haitians living abroad, many of these gains
were reversed by the amendments. The amendments to the constitution lay
dormant, out of public view. In fact, Parliament voted to dissolve itself to
make way for the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC), co-chaired by
Bill Clinton, in April 2010. Importantly the IHRC was to hand over governance
to Parliament and the newly elected president. When Parliament was back in
session in 2011, the first task laid out for them was to ratify the amendments
to the constitution. President Michel Martelly, a.k.a. “Sweet Micky,” the
winner from the second round of a record low voter turnout of 22%, less than
half the previous 2006 elections, pushed for the ratification. He was joined by
several foreign agencies, apparently keen on naming the Permanent Electoral
Council in a top-down, rushed process that gave the current government the
advantage. The coverage of this was murky and confused. Like all other laws, it
needed to be published in the official journal of the State, Le Moniteur.
Following all this discussion, it was not clear what the final version was.
Only the French version was published.

One of the changes included that the President name a Prime
Minister and apparently without requiring a full Parliamentary ratification.
The new constitution allows for the leaders of both houses to agree. These two
individuals had the most stake in the prolongation of their mandate following
the deal reached with Martelly. When Prime Minister Lamothe resigned, Martelly
named Evans Paul, a.k.a. K. Plim, who had perennially promoted and positioned
himself as “mediator.” The terms of the lower house, the Deputies, were set to
expire the second Monday of January, which turned out to be January 12, the
fifth anniversary of the earthquake. In addition, a third of the Senate’s terms
were also set to expire, meaning that this house too would be below quorum. The
sticking point in the conflict between Martelly and the opposition was
following the electoral law and naming the representatives for the Electoral
Council. As Parliament teetered toward collapse, President Martelly’s hand grew
stronger, and the international pressure to “negotiate” to avoid a “political
crisis” grew. In effect international agencies like the European Union, the
U.S., the U.N., and the World Bank were lining up to support Martelly. These
actors concerned with “democracy” said nothing when Martelly replaced all but a
handful of the country’s mayors. They indicated that if a negotiated solution –
Martelly’s position hadn’t changed – was not reached, they would continue to
support the government of Haiti even though he would have to rule by decree.
This same state of affairs, ruling by decree, was cited by many of these same international
agencies in 1999 as the reason they suspended assistance to Haiti.

With a speculated estimated value of $20 billion, this
represents a significant wealth. However, given Haiti’s infrastructure,
especially after the earthquake, there is insufficient in-country capacity and
even technical expertise to evaluate contracts. Significantly, the
“exploitation” contracts were granted without Parliamentary approval. However,
in February of 2013 Parliament responded, issuing a resolution calling for a moratorium
on mining in Haiti, citing the questionable legality of the Conventions as one
of their main concerns. Shortly thereafter, the Martelly administration
successfully recruited the World Bank to support its effort to restructure its
mining laws and obtained support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to
manage mining contracts and create a national cadaster. Communities and civil
society organizations have organized to promote their interests and defend
their rights. At issue was local communities’ participation and approval, given
the loss of agricultural land and therefore peasant livelihood, not to mention
the significant environmental damage mining causes. The contracts made no
provisions for environmental review or protections. Finally, the contracts
expropriated the vast majority of the profits out of the country. The campaign
succeeded in a parliamentary inquiry and eventually a resolution in December
2012 with these safeguards in effect. Mining activity has been on hold in Haiti
as the government rewrites the law.

Without a parliament and President Martelly ruling by
decree, allowed for resumption. This – in addition to other development
strategies such as high-end tourism that benefit foreign capitalist interests
at the expense of local communities – is the main motivation colleagues
attribute to the so-called “international community’s” support of the current
status. In fact the facilitating exploratory law was on the books in 2005,
during the “transition” following Aristide’s ouster. In addition to secrecy,
which seems to be the modus operandi of capital advancement, companies openly
cited UN’s presence as attracting foreign investment. And so mining
activities recommenced, with the World Bank not listening to local concerns,
until a journalist unearthed that one of these no-bid contracts went to none
other than the brother of the then-Secretary of State, current Presidential
Candidate, Hillary Clinton, this April.

Killing with kindness is a more powerful strategy. With a
humanitarian mask, NGO aid has made inroads in almost all corners of the
country. While the results of foreign aid are mixed, with most of the benefits
accruing to foreign aid workers and local elite groups, a nonstop humanitarian
occupation has led to greater complacency, dependency, and division. Explicitly
racist and imperialist foreign troops might succeed in pacification and
building institutions, but they also tend to trigger a violent, nationalist
resistance. Contemporary foreign aid is more far-reaching, and more effective
at quelling, buying off, or dividing potential threats to the foreign-imposed
order.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has great potential to benefit
humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Autonomous
weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder
and nuclear arms. Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human
intervention. Artificial Intelligence technology has reached a point where the
deployment of such systems is feasible within years, not decades.

autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.
Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials,
so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to
mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black
market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control
their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc.
Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing
nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic
group. A military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity.

Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should
be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human
control.

There has been so far 1850 signatories to an open letter
calling for the ban on such weaponry. Stephen Hawkings, Noam Chomsky, Apple
co-founder Steve Wozniak and Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis.

Donald Trump is rich. Really, really rich. And you’re not. And there’s a very simple reason.

No, it’s not because he works harder than you. It’s not
because he’s smarter, tougher or better informed either. It’s not because he
has mastered “the art of the deal.” It’s not because he dreams bigger than you.
It’s not because he’s a “winner” and you’re a “loser.” It’s not even that he
had a rich daddy, and you didn’t (although that helps a lot).

Donald Trump is rich, and you’re not, because because he uses other
people’s money.

Trump borrowed billions from bankers and used the money to put
up buildings like Trump Tower and open casinos like the Taj Mahal. In his
books, Trump says that by the early 1990s he owed more than $9 billion. His
companies have filed for bankruptcy. Twice. The losers were the lenders had to suffer
the losses. He then raised more money from bankers, bondholders and even stockholders
along the way. Two more times his companies filed for bankruptcy. Lenders and
investors paid the price.

“I have used the bankruptcy laws a few times to make deals
better,” Trump said recently “Nothing personal, just business… It’s a very
effective & commonly used business tool.”

“When you grow up in a wealthy family, it’s much much harder
to feel that what you’ve achieved is on your own. And it’s much much harder for
people to think that what you’ve achieved is on your own. So my children have a
bit of a disadvantage — yes, they have money and they have a good education and
so forth — but they have to achieve things on their own. And it’s a much harder
thing for them to do that. And so I try to let them succeed on their own. But
it’s very difficult for a parent to want to just say to their child, ‘Do what
you can and I’m not going to help you.’ Because you want to help your child,
but you want the child to be independent and strong enough so they can achieve
on their own.” - Billionaire private equity chief David Rubenstein, the
co-founder of Carlyle Group,

whose net worth is estimated at $2.9 billion.

All together now ...awwwwwwwwwwww, diddums, the hard-done by wee souls.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says there is a strong
link between the weakening of unions and the rise in income share of the top 10
per cent, leading to growing income inequalities. The discussion paper,
‘Inequality and Labour Market Institutions’ by analysts Florence Jaumotte and
Carolina Osorio Buitron, says “The decline in unionisation is related to the
rise of top income shares and less redistribution, while the erosion of minimum
wages is correlated with considerable increases in overall inequality.”

By weakening earnings for middle- and low-income workers by
reducing their bargaining power, de-unionisation “necessarily increases the
income share of corporate managers’ pay and shareholder returns....Moreover,
weaker unions can reduce workers’ influence on corporate decisions that benefit
top earners, such as the size and structure of top executive compensation”, it
says.

The IMF paper, based on studies in 20 advanced economies
from 1982 to 2010, says it found evidence that “the decline in union density —
the fraction of union members in the workforce —is strongly associated with the
rise of top income shares,” adding that “unions help raise wages, both for
members and the community at large and can affect income redistribution through
their influence on public policy.

The paper is significant as it comes at a time there is a
marked decimation in the power of unions across the world, along with growing
contractual and casual labour. In India, 11 trade unions in India, which have
given a call for a country-wide strike on September 2, have also listed
problems in getting unions registered among their demands. 90 per cent of the
Indian workforce is in the unorganised sector and are not unionised.

Researchers Mark R. Rank and Thomas A. Hirschl did a
long-term study which followed 4,800 households from 1968 to 2011. They
followed groups of people from ages 25 to 60 in order to get a sense of how
many people will fall into poverty and extreme poverty within their lifetimes. "Rather
than an uncommon event," Rank says, "poverty was much more common
than many people had assumed once you looked over a long period of time."

“Our results indicate that the occurrence of relative
poverty is fairly widespread. Between the ages of 25 and 60, 61.8 percent of
the population will experience at least one year of poverty, whereas 42.1
percent will experience extreme poverty. Furthermore, 24.9 percent of the
population will encounter five or more years of poverty, and 11.4 percent will
experience five or more years of extreme poverty.”

On a campaign stop, Jeb Bush said:

“My aspiration for the country — and I believe we can
achieve it — is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have
to be a lot more productive, work-force participation has to rise from its
all-time modern lows, means that people need to work longer hours and through
their productivity gain more income for their families. That’s the only way
we’re going to get out of this rut that we’re in.”

According to Bush, we’re having some economic problems —
slow economic growth, low worker productivity, and Americans families who
aren’t bringing in enough income. According to Bush, the individual behavior of
American workers is to blame for these problems. Ultimately, for Bush and
others like him, poverty can be explained away by attributing it to the failure
of low-income people’s individual work ethic. Bush’s rhetoric may get him the
Republican nomination but as an explanation for our economic problems it fails
miserably. And it fails precisely because it focuses on the individual behavior
of workers, rather than the economic and political institutions within which
they find themselves.

In Minneapolis, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC) published a report on the challenges workers there face when providing for their
families. NOC surveyed more than 500 hourly workers in North Minneapolis about
their work schedules, compensation, and benefits like paid sick days. Fifty-one
percent of the workers NOC surveyed make $10 an hour or less. “Nearly 40
percent of workers surveyed are working part-time schedules, which is 34 hours
or less per week.” People working only part-time and at low wages are
struggling to provide for their families. To them, Jeb Bush would say, “work
more hours.” But as NOC’s report demonstrates, these vulnerable workers can’t
work more hours. It’s not that they don’t want to. In fact, 78 percent of
part-time hourly workers and even 58 percent of full-time hourly workers
reported that they would prefer to work more hours than they are currently
assigned. However, hourly workers have little to no control over their schedules
and cannot simply choose to work more hours.

Often, they are scheduled for on-call shifts, meaning they
must be available to their employers to work a shift, but they are not
guaranteed work that day. The employer may choose to not call them in and the
worker then loses that opportunity to gain income from a day’s work. In
addition, hourly workers are often sent home early before the end of their
scheduled shift. On-call shifts and sending workers home early save the
employer money, but have negative effects for the workers who lose income and
cannot adequately budget due to unpredictable earnings.

Some might argue that part-time hourly workers should simply
get a second job if they want to be able to provide a decent life for
themselves and their families. However, NOC’s research demonstrates that most
workers are not free to find secondary employment. Many of the workers NOC
surveyed are required to have “open availability,” which means they can be
scheduled to work at any time, day or night. The challenges workers face due to
open availability policies are compounded by schedules that change weekly, or
even daily. “Over half (55 percent) of all hourly workers surveyed reported
that they receive their schedules a week or less in advance.” Subject to open
availability policies and without a set schedule, coordinating a work schedule
with a secondary employer is prohibitively difficult. Unpredictable schedules
and open availability policies are, then, significant impediments to secondary
employment.

In another NOC report NOC’s illustrates the transit
challenges that low-income workers face that make secondary employment
virtually impossible. In Minnesota, people of color are disproportionately
employed in low-income jobs. In addition, low-income people of color are
significantly more likely to rely on public transportation to get to and from
their places of employment. As NOC’s research demonstrates, workers using
public transportation to commute to work pay a significant time penalty for
doing so. “Every year, Black and Asian transit users spend the hourly
equivalent of about 3.5 weeks of work more than white drivers on their commutes
alone. For Latino transit users, it is nearly 4.5 weeks.” As NOC points out the
transit penalty has deeply problematic effects on workers from communities of
color. “That means that for a month a year more than white drivers, transit
commuters of color are unavailable for working, helping children with homework,
helping parents get to the doctor, running errands, volunteering in their
communities, or participating in their churches.”

NOC’s reports demonstrate important ways in which the
individualist rhetoric around poverty in America obscures the causes of poverty
among low-income workers. Low-income workers are vulnerable to economic
exploitation by their employers. They do not earn a living wage and have little
control over the number of hours they work in any given week. Our labor laws
and economic policies at all levels — city, state, and national — put the
interests of employers over workers. To say to the most vulnerable among us
“work harder” is to ignore the structural challenges low-income workers face.
It’s an individualistic oversimplification of the problem.

“The systemic barriers that people in poverty face often
manifest themselves in a deep lack of self esteem and a strongly ingrained
sense of despair. Faced with what they perceive as impregnable barriers, people
in poverty find no one to blame for their failures but themselves. Even if they
verbally blame others, to try to save face, they keep internalizing the
poverty.

“The predominance of misconceptions, stereotypes, and
punitive structures, combined with the harshness of their daily struggles for
survival and the elusiveness of any kind of success, create experiences for
people in poverty that often lead them to internalize the blame for their
poverty situation. This blame creates internal barriers that lower their
self-esteem, extinguish their dreams, and further limit their abilities to
succeed. This in turn greatly affects their expectations for the future and
impedes their hopes to lead a fulfilling and successful life.

“People who live in poverty in the United States have
experiences that teach them they are not as good as other people and that they
somehow deserve what has happened to them. Because we do not teach about
structural causes of poverty, people in poverty often think of themselves as
somehow deficient and less worthy than
others who live in more affluent circumstances (Freire, 1970). Growing up in
poverty meant that they were often ostracized for their appearance and shamed
into believing that if they were born into poverty they had done something to
get there. As a result, a natural reaction of people in poverty is to hide
their poverty experiences and develop a tough exterior. Shame and poverty go
hand in hand.

“Many of the shaming messages come from the interaction of
people in poverty with those who are not familiar with their life experiences.
Helping professionals, for example, often fail to show the people they serve
that they are talented, creative, and worthwhile and that they are just as
smart and motivated as middle-class people. They also fail to project the
belief that middle-class are not better human beings, but rather they are
people who have simply received better opportunities and support. “Another
source of these messages is people who tend to blame the characters of people
in poverty when something goes wrong, but blame the situation when the same
thing happens to them. Attribution theory assumes that people try to determine
why people do what they do. A person seeking to understand why another person
did something may attribute one or more motives to that person’s behavior.

“Attribution theory explains that people tend to attribute
causes for behavior to the situation (or to factors outside themselves) when
they understand and empathize with the circumstances of a situation. Alternately,
a lack of understanding, typically leads a person to place the cause of the
misbehavior on the other person (or to their personality and other internal
traits). For example, someone may say, “I got a ticket for speeding, but it was
a speed trap.” But when they hear of another person receiving a speeding
ticket, they may say, “She is a speeder.” Another example is someone saying, “I
was going through a rough time and started drinking too much. I put my family
through a lot and needed help.” But when describing another person’s problem
with alcohol, that same person might say, “He is an alcoholic and does not
really care about his family.”

“Middle-class and wealthy people understand their own
circumstances and attribute the causes of their behavior to the situation.
However, they tend to attribute the behavior of people in poverty to the
personalities of the people rather than the situation. Blaming someone’s
personality degrades the person and leaves no hope. It is not helpful since
most people see personality as an essential, unchangeable quality. Attributing
cause to a situation allows the option of identifying solutions to a problem
through changing the situation.”

Monday, July 27, 2015

On the US/Mexican border there were a total of 2,268 Border
Patrol agents in 1980; by 2012 the Border Patrol had funding for 21,370 agents,
nearly 10 times as many as 20 years earlier. The Border Patrol's annual budget
was $263 million in 1990; by 2014 it had jumped thirteen-fold to $3.6 billion.

The US had already built 651 miles of fencing as of February
2012 and the estimated cost of the fence's construction and its maintenance
over the next 20 years is $6.5 billion.

The government has been imposing criminal sentences on
border crossers since 2005; the program, code-named "Operation
Streamline," had processed 208,939 people by the end of 2012. While it's
hard to estimate the total bill for Streamline, it could be costing us as much
as $300 million a year just through the increase it has created in the federal
prison population.

Why do some US politicians constantly call for more border
enforcement. One obvious reason is it is quite profitable for powerful business
interests. In September 2006, for example, the Boeing corporation won a
contract worth an estimated $2.5 billion to set up the "Secure Border
Initiative Network" (SBInet), a web of new surveillance technology and
sensors with real-time communications systems. After spending $1 billion on
this "virtual fence," the government scrapped the project in January
2011, saying it "does not meet current standards for viability and cost
effectiveness." A growing number of Border Patrol agents and their
increasing militarization translates into a higher demand for more guns and
other equipment from the "defense” industries. This is especially
important as the US military reduces its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"So as the wars are winding down, we're trying to find more applications
for this technology here in the US," a division manager from the Applied
Research Associates firm explained to the Huffington Post in April.

Increased border enforcement also means increased
incarceration for immigrants and this means more business for the private “for-profit”
prison industry. In the decade leading up to 2013, just three of these
companies poured out some $45 million in various lobbying efforts. Recipients
of funds from the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country's
largest private prison company, include such rabidly anti-immigrant Republicans
as Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin.

Creating anxiety about immigration has political uses as
well. As Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey, observed, "Politicians find
the symbolic trope of an 'invasion of illegal aliens' too useful to give
up." Xenophobic and irrational fears of invasion, violation and disease
from foreign and dark-skinned people have historically provided a good tool for
distracting the US population from the real failures of the political and
economic system. In August 2014, Georgia Republican Phil Gingrey, then a member
of the House of Representatives, suggested that Central American minors might
be carrying the Ebola virus. Gingrey, formerly a practicing physician, should
have known that no Ebola cases had ever
been reported in Latin America. Donald Trump and right-wing columnist Ann Coulter
slanders all immigrants as thieves, rapists and murderers, pandering the same
part of the national psyche as white racists' fraudulent rape charges against
African Americans, the rationalization for thousands of lynchings in the 19th
and 20th centuries.

Forgotten are the At least 5,607 people died while
attempting to enter the country between 1994 and 2008, many buried in unmarked
mass graves. University of California, San Diego professor Wayne Cornelius has
noted that the death toll at the border just in the decade from 1993 to 2003
was more than 10 times as high as the number of people killed trying to cross
the Berlin Wall in its 28-year history. The deaths have continued even as the
rate of border crossings fell: an average of 360 people died this way each year
in 2010 and 2011. This is the real border crisis, and we shouldn't ignore an irrational
enforcement policy killing hundreds of innocent human beings each year for the
supposed crime of wanting to get a job or to reunite with friends and family.

The Socialist Party holds no party line on a number of
environmental issues that are dear to many peoples’ hearts. However, we do propose
a society which has democratic structures in place so that decisions can be
made by the people for the people based upon the fullest untainted information
available. Capitalism, on the other hand, is all about vested interests possessing political power
and suppressing access to information.

We previously posted a report about one of the many fracking
lobbies endeavouring to influence the American presidential election process. We
now post a story that members of U.S. Congress who vote against mandatory
labeling for genetically modified (GMO) products receive three times as much
funding from the food and agriculture lobbies as their colleagues, according to
new reporting from Open Secrets, a project of the Center for Responsive
Politics. Coincidence? We think not. Supporters of the anti-labeling bill which
passed the House of Representatives last Thursday collectively received $29.9
million from the agribusiness lobby and food and beverage industry during the
2014 election cycle. At 230 Republicans and 45 Democrats, that averages roughly
$108,900 per member to support HR 1599—officially titled the Safe and Accurate
Food Labeling Act of 2015. HR1599 was backed by the food industry, including
the Grocery Manufacturers Association and Monsanto Company, which have poured
money into defeating GMO labeling initiatives. HR 1599 passed with 275 to 150
votes.

Co-sponsors of the anti-labeling bill "received
six-figure dollar amounts from providers of agricultural services and
products...during the 2014 election cycle. That put them high among the top 20
recipients of funds from the industry," Open Secrets reports. Among those
lawmakers are Reps. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), Rodney
Davis (R-Ill.), Mike Conaway (R-Texas), and Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), most of
whom also sit on the House Agriculture Committee. Reps. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.)
and G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), two original sponsors of the legislation, were
the top two current House members receiving the most money from the Grocery
Manufacturers Association in 2014. The grocery manufacturers — who have spent
$4.1 million lobbying on all issues so far this year, almost as much as they
spent in all of 2014 — have lobbied on the bill more than any other
organization, mentioning the measure on 14 lobbying reports this year. After
the Grocery Manufacturers Association, PepsiCo Inc ($2.5 million in overall
lobbying this year) and Monsanto Co ($2.6 million) have mentioned the bill most
frequently.

Food and environmental activists called for the Senate to
vote down HR 1599 when it reaches the chamber. "Passage of this bill is an
attempt by Monsanto and its agribusiness cronies to crush the democratic
decision-making of tens of millions of Americans. Corporate influence has won
and the voice of the people has been ignored," Andrew Kimbrell, executivedirector of Center for Food Safety, said.

Following on from our
previous article on the pharmaceutical business practices we read in thisarticle of further deceit.

Pharmaceutical corporations have created expensive drugs
that treat such rare conditions as being sleepy during the day – that may mean
you have narcolepsy says Jazz Pharmaceuticals which its drug Xyrem treats for
$35,000 per year. If you have frequent
diarrhea, gas and bloating, it might not be because of your bad diet and eating
habits but because you may have exocrine pancreatic insufficiency says AbbVie
to sell the drug Creon. Your sore back may not be from your exertions at work
but from a disease called ankylosing spondylitis, says AbbVie, a condition that
can be treated with its biologic drug Humira for as much as $20,000 a year.
(Injectable “biologic” drugs are a new drug industry push because they are so
expensive and less susceptible to generic competition than pills.)

Drug companies say they charge those outrageous prices as
recouping their research and development costs but admit that their drugs are
priced on “value”—what they are “worth” for the patient’s health. Needless to
say such valuations come pretty close to the definition of extortion—offers you
“can’t refuse.”

Why does the same hepatitis C drug that costs $84,000 a year
in the US cost $900 a year in Egypt asked Forbes staff writer Avik Roy. Since
most hepatitis C patients in the US are uninsured, underinsured or imprisoned,
taxpayers pick up the bill through Medicaid, the VA and prison systems writes
Roy.

Sanofi and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals who made the statin
Lipitor the best selling drug in the world before it went off patent are rolling
out a cholesterol lowering drug which could be embraced by the millions. The
list price of Praluent, an injectable biologic, is over $14,600 a year. Like Gilead, Sanofi and Regeneron say the
price reflects what it is worth in potential benefits to patients and savings
to the health care system—e.g. what they can get.

The rise of
industrial factory production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to
the displacement of agricultural workers into industrial labour in the
enlarging towns. There was already a clearly divided society between the
majority of the people – the farm workers, labourers, servants and peripherals
(soldiers, minor traders and so on) – and the gentry (the owners of the land,
property etc) who were an upper ruling class apart and the owners and
instigators of the new industrialisation.

The working
conditions in the factories, mines, mills and the like were dire, long and
harsh, often dangerous. The vote was limited to the gentry and the monarchy
(Magna Carta). Protests by the workers
at the harshness – a form of industrial slavery – were repressed by ‘law and
order’ armed forces.

The accumulation
of money, not just the ownership, soon became a dominant feature of the upper
ruling class – the acquisition of capital was a spur to production with the
growing science and technology creating more productive labour workers.

One machine
could do 700 hours of manual labour – and so the divide between labour and
capital ownership become more evident and eventually led to the development of trade
unionism, aspiring for unity and fairness, and for social reform.

By the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century this was spreading across the industrialised countries
of Europe and the concept of a different society evolved – one of more equality
and common ownership of the means of production. Several elements came together and the term ‘Socialism’
was born. A loose socialist federation of
workers, trade unionists and progressive intellectuals with the same socialist aspiration.

The Labour Party
was born from the trade unions with the support of intellectual activists such
as the Fabian Society, democrats and others to win the united support of the
workers with ‘practical’ reforms as an inevitable steam-roller progress to a
better world. Similar political movements
also arose such as the Communists.

One party
however, was formed in 1904 which stood clearly and solely for the democratic
understanding and support of the majority of the people for the fundamental
change from class ownership to the common ownership and democratic control of
the means of production and distribution – anything less would be a diversion
leading to the continuation of capitalism. That party was the Socialist Party
of Great Britain.

Over the twentieth
century the Labour Party and other reformists thrived, with much popular
support for reforms culminating, perhaps, in the apogee of the sweeping
election victory of 1945 and the rise of the Communists in Russia. It was a
poisoned chalice. Besotted with their triumph, they were consumed with the
power of running a capitalist state. Their last vestiges of socialist aspiration
had died.

We still have
capitalism with all its fearful flaws and inequalities, and socialist society is
still seen as a fanciful irrelevancy.

Now the Labour
Party is entirely consumed and thinks of nothing but the best way to get
elected to run capitalism, just as do the Conservatives, Liberals, UKIP and all
the rest. They are essentially indistinguishable and sterile, looking for
leaders to hopefully sort out our lives for us. They shake their heads at
socialism as unpractical utopianism while they recruit and train ‘heroes’ to
kill other ‘heroes’ in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan to acquire ‘their’
oil etc. They end up with billionaires and food banks. The halcyon days of trade unionism, the
’left’ wing, the formation of the capitalist NHS with the disillusionment of
the early ‘socialists’ such as Aneurin Bevan are now effete. Reduced to the discussion of capitalist power
through the pathetic smog of Cameron v. Miliband
(or whoever takes over from him - can you tell the difference?)

No wonder people
want to escape to triviality - Downton, Emmerdale, etc. But think about it.
Take your life from their hands to the better world of true civilisation of
humanity – before it’s too late!

The British Medical
Journal has published a study that impacts upon our understanding of the State’s
role in medicalising unemployment. It is well worth quoting extracts from it

Eligibility for social security benefits in many advanced
economies is dependent on unemployed and underemployed people carrying out an
expanding range of job search, training and work preparation activities, as
well as mandatory unpaid labour (workfare). Increasingly, these activities
include interventions intended to modify attitudes, beliefs and personality. We
now have a situation being implemented where there is the use of psychology in
the delivery of workfare functions to erase the experience and effects of
social and economic inequalities, to construct a psychological ideal that links
unemployment to psychological deficit, and so to authorise the extension of
state—and state-contracted—surveillance to psychological characteristics.

Welfare reforms have led to increased emphasis on the
conditionality of social security payments and the ‘activation’ of their
recipients, avowedly to avert or correct ethical and psychological ‘dependency’
and other forms of debility, depression and etiolated work ethic, which are
widely thought to be both symptom and cause of unemployment. Failure to meet
conditions placed on eligibility for benefits is punished directly by benefit
sanctions (the part or total cessation of social security payments for a given
period of time), as well as indirectly by compulsory ‘support’ in the form of
workfare, ‘skills training’, psychological referral or psychometric testing.
The conditions are diverse in kind as well as wide-ranging: from age and
residence criteria, or restrictions on numbers of (paid) hours worked per week,
to possession of certain levels of qualifications and the capacity to
demonstrate positive opinions on employment. The expansion of conditionality in
this way is linked to the continually increasing rate at which Jobseeker's
Allowance (JSA) and Employment and Support Allowance claimants are sanctioned
(the three months to September 2013 saw JSA claimants sanctioned at a rate of
6% of claimants per month, the highest since the introduction of JSA in 1996).
Failure to participate in a training or employment scheme is the most
frequently occurring ‘failure’ that results in a sanction. These mandatory
interventions designed to ‘shift attitudes and beliefs’ have become an
important element of ‘activating’ the unemployed, and are the focus of this
paper. Although payments by the state to people without jobs have been tied to
desirable patterns of behaviour since their first institution, the unemployment
policies of reformed welfare states now aim at more complete and intimate
behaviour change through coercive mechanisms of greater scope

Workfare means the ‘work-for-your-benefits’ schemes in which
unemployed people are forced to work for a charity, business, social
enterprise, public service or government agency in order to continue to be
eligible for benefits. We also include the range of skills-building and
motivational workshops that are presented alongside such schemes—as part of a
range of activities that unemployed people are obliged to undertake—and schemes
that are composed of training courses in tandem with unpaid work (Skills
Conditionality is an example of the former; Traineeships and Sector-Based Work
Academies of the latter). The participation of unemployed people in schemes
with training elements is secured by the same means as work placement schemes:
through the threat—tacit or explicit, indirect or direct—of sanctions. Workfare
is central to normalisation of the idea that harsh sanctions should be used to
underwrite certain obligations of citizenship, and to singling out as the
paramount obligation the enforcement of work, with no regard to the specific
character of that work or to a person's other responsibilities. Workfare furthers
the separation of work and livelihood and normalises the idea that certain
groups of people are not entitled to payment for their labour and that lengthy
periods of unpaid labour (eg, internships or ‘volunteering’) are a precondition
for employment. In this way, it undermines the security, pay and conditions of
all workers and non-workers. Moreover, it demands that people assent to the
idea that paid work as it is currently organised is the only route to both
personal fulfilment and public value and obscures the economic reality of a
dual labour market that produces and relies upon the stratification of work and
the escalating inequalities in income and quality of working life.

Psycho-compulsion, defined as the imposition of
psychological explanations for unemployment, together with mandatory activities
intended to modify beliefs, attitude, disposition or personality, has become a
more and more central feature of activating the unemployed and hence of
people’s experience of unemployment. There has been little debate about the
recruitment of psychology—and, by implication, psychologists—into monitoring,
modifying and punishing people who claim social security benefits or research
into the impact of mandatory positive affect on an expanding range of ‘unproductive’
or failing citizens: those who are out of work, not working enough, not earning
enough and/or failing to seek work with sufficient application. A number of
reports produced for the Cabinet Office under both the previous Labour
government and the current Coalition have drawn centrally upon psychology and
behavioural economics for the legitimation and direction of behaviour change
policy or ‘instrumental behaviourism’. Psychology allied to behavioural
economics allows the sector to consolidate its self-conception as an industry
in its own right that sets its own standards and regulates itself. In this
setting, psychology (and ‘therapy discourse’ more generally) coproduces and
validates the core mythologies of neoliberalism, while simultaneously
undermining and eroding alternative discourses—of solidarity, collectivity and
interdependence. It functions not only to reinforce the view that achieving the
status of (paid) working citizen is ‘the pinnacle of human experience’ but also
to construct a very specific definition of the attitudes, beliefs and
attributes that constitute ‘employability’: the ‘right kind of subject’; the
‘right kind of affect’. The roll-call of valued characteristics familiar from
positive psychology, the wellbeing industry and public health—‘confidence,
optimism, self-efficacy, aspiration’—are imposed in and through programmes of
mandatory training and job preparation. They also feature centrally in the way
in which people receiving benefits frame their own experiences. The duties of
citizenship are expanded to include enforced rational self-governance so that
liberal subjects’ capabilities, inclinations and desires are in accord with
values and expectations that are identified as already given by a civil society
centred on the labour market. These kinds of policies, seeking to model in
unemployed people the imperatives of the market, are carried out by means of
the market, through those who are paid to ‘activate’ claimants and those who
benefit from their unpaid labour.

The imposition of psychological explanations for
unemployment functions to erase the economic realities of the labour market and
authorises the extension of state-sanctioned surveillance to psychological
characteristics. Compulsory positive affect and psychological authority are
being applied in workfare in order to (1) identify ostensible psychological
barriers to gaining employment and to inculcate attributes and attitudes said
to increase employability; (2) punish people for non-compliance (through
conditionality and benefit sanctions) and (3) legitimise workfare and other
coercive labour market measures. The consistent failure of workfare
interventions to achieve their stated aim of improving work outcomes—both in
the UK and internationally—has resulted in a much greater focus on
psychological or ‘soft outcomes’, said to ‘move people closer to work’. ‘Soft
outcomes’ disarticulate work and wages by treating a job as something that may
be gained by possessing the right attitude to work (an attitude for which one
must labour) and work as something to be valued because it evinces and activates
the right attitude in the (potential) employee—rather than because it allows
one to purchase a living. At the same time, the means by which soft outcomes
are regulated (sanctions: for failures in attitude and in compliance with the
actions demanded by active labour market measures) link together more closely
than ever a person's failure to manifest the right attitude and their inability
to afford to purchase a living. Efforts to achieve these ‘soft outcomes’ are
evident in the course content of mandatory training programmes run by major
workfare contractors like A4e and Ingeus and are increasingly apparent in the
personal testimonies of claimants.

In a scheme recently announced, claimants will undergo
interviews to assess whether they have a ‘psychological resistance’ to work,
along with attitude profiling to judge whether they are ‘bewildered, despondent
or determined’.Those deemed ‘less mentally fit’ will be subject to more
intensive coaching, while those who are ‘optimistic’—such as graduates or those
who have recently been made redundant—can be placed on less rigorous regimes.
This classification system will be used to recruit to a new scheme obliging
those who are long-term unemployed to spend 35 hours a week at a job centre. Jobcentres
and the premises of welfare-to-work contractors are not neutral settings for
interventions or decisions about the relative degree of unemployed people's
material hardship, ‘willingness to work’, ‘readiness’ for work or ‘resistance’
to work: they are intensely anxiety-inducing and intimidating locations that
bear witness to marked imbalances of power.

The participation of psychology and psychologists in the
delivery of coercive goals in welfare reform clearly raises ethical questions. here
is no evidence that work programme psycho-interventions increase the likelihood
of gaining paid work that lasts any length of time. In perpetuating notions of
psychological failure, they shift attention away from the social patterning of
unemployment and from wider trends: market failure, precarity, the rise of
in-work poverty, the cost of living crisis and the scale of income
inequalities. They contribute centrally to the reification of paid work and the
concomitant devaluing and discounting of all other activities, contributions, values
and commitments. Above all, psychology is implicated in what amounts to a
‘substitution of outcomes’, where the modification of psychological attributes
stands in for delivering actual improvements in household income or increasing
the availability of real paid work.

Psychological fundamentalism—also evident in the burgeoning
well-being industry—together with the rise of psychological conditionality, has
a very direct impact on the lives of people claiming welfare benefits. This
impact has barely been documented and highlights the need for deeper research
scrutiny and more pressing questions about relationships between psychology and
the medical humanities.

Americans diagnosed with cancer are at risk of losing their
life savings because cancer drug costs are escalating almost as fast as the
worst forms of the disease, according to a Mayo Clinic medical journal article
decrying these costs signed by scores of nationally known oncologists. Nearly
120 oncologists co-authored the article, including more than 30 past presidents
of the American Societies of Clinical Oncology, Hematology and Cancer.

There will be a rising incidence of cancer in the aging
population and high cancer drug prices will affect millions of Americans.

“In the United States, the average price of new cancer drugs
increased 5- to 10-fold over 15 years, to more than $100,000 per year in 2012,”
the article says. “The cost of drugs for each additional year lived (after
adjusting for inflation) has increased from $54,000 in 1995 to $207,000 in
2013. This increase is causing harm to patients with cancer and their families.”

Cancer will affect one in three people during their lives.
Most health plans require co-pays of 20 to 30 percent of the total drug cost.
In 2014, all of the cancer drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration—including promising approaches such as molecular-focused
therapies—were “priced above $120,000 per year,” Mayo noted. That figure is
double the average annual U.S. household income of $52,000. “Patients with
cancer then have to make difficult choices between spending their incomes (and
liquidating assets) on potentially lifesaving therapies or foregoing treatment
to provide for family necessities (food, housing, education),” Mayo said. “This
decision is even more critical for senior citizens who are more frequently
affected by cancers and have lower incomes and limited assets.” Oral
medications were most expensive, but their overall sky-high cost meant that “10
to 20 percent of patients with cancer do not take the perscribed treatment or
compromise it.”

“Cancer is very scary,” Dr. Ayalew Tefferi, the lead author,
told NPR. “Everybody’s shocked. But they don’t know about the second shock
coming, and that is the financial destruction that’s coming with it. That comes
in the course of treatment. That comes after the patient dies. All of a sudden,
they see that their lifelong savings is being given to drug companies.” Tefferi
explained , “It is a crisis, an ongoing crisis, that needs to be dealt with as
soon as possible. This undermines our Hippocratic Oath, and undermines our
responsibilities to our patients.”

Tefferi blames drug company greed, physicians who are too
quick to prescribe new drugs without proven efficacy, health insurers willing
to go along with upwards of $3,000-a-month co-pays, and a lack of federal
government oversight adding checks and balances to a Wild West of drug pricing
— especially for the federal health plan for seniors, Medicare, which is barred
from negotiating drug prices. “The prices are fixed by the drug companies,”
Tefferi said. “There is no regulation… drug companies hold the cards in terms
of deciding how much we have to pay for them, or the patients have to pay for
them.” Medicare, unlike the Department of Veterans Affairs, has been barred by
Congress from negotiating for drug price breaks—one of the pharmaceutical
industry’s sordid lobbying achievements.

Countering the pharmaceutical claims that they are not
exploitative, Donald W. Light, a fellow at Harvard University’s E.J. Safra
Center for Ethics and a professor at Rowan University School of Osteopathic
Medicine, and Hagop Kantarjian, professor and chair of the Department of
Leukemia at MD Anderson Cancer Center, in the May issue of AARP Bulletin, said,
“The argument that drug companies are offering improved drugs for these higher
prices is not true,” they continued. “Oncologists find that most new cancer
drugs provide few clinical advantages over existing ones. Only one of the 12
new cancer drugs approved in 2012 helps patients survive more than two months
longer.” The two researchers also deconstructed the industry’s claim that it
spends on average $1.3 billion to create new drugs and get FDA approval. The
real figure would be one-tenth of that—closer to $125 million, they said, after
deducting taxpayer subsidies, comparisons to other investment opportunities,
inflating the cost of basic research and other factors. “In sum, we find no
credible evidence that the real research costs to major companies themselves
for cancer research are higher than producing other drugs,” their AARP analysis
said. “So why are cancer drug prices higher? We think pharmaceutical companies are
price-gouging. Even worse, companies raise the prices on some of their older
drugs by 20 to 25 percent a year. In the past decade, they have almost doubled
their prices for cancer drugs.”

The pharmaceutical industry is presently lobbying Congress
to pass a bill that would slow the distribution of generic drugs—adding
billions to annual taxpayer costs for Medicare and Medicaid, progressive
economists say—by exempting drug makers from a new patent review board that was
intended to keep companies from making bogus claims about their patents. In
other words, while some of the nation's leading cancer doctors are trying to
draw attention to an unnecessary medical crisis causing financial ruin for many
American households, the pharmaceutical industry is pressuring Congress to give
it greater profit-making abilities.

Capitalism once more proves how sick a society it is when it
endeavours to make profits off sick people. It preys on the weak the vulnerable
and the elderly. Of course, the blame doesn't belong to just the pharmaceutical
companies and the US Government, but the American people as well. It is the
majority of American people who think the capitalist system is perfectly fine.
It is the majority of American people who voted in Congressmen and
Congresswomen who continue to vote in the interests of massive companies at the
expense of the same people who voted them in. (Just where do the “pro-lifers”
actually stand?) The drug companies and the government may be the ones working
the levers of our national demise, but it is the American people cheering them
on. We cannot change the system by using the system itself. The so-called
safety-net doesn't exist in any shape, manner or form. Business exists to make
a profit. If it's activities end up benefiting people, that's an unintended
consequence, a mere "bonus". But the first interest of any business
is to make a profit. Everything else is secondary to that.

Big Pharma is
murdering us for their profits but they kill us off slowly to ensure a healthy
return before our demise.